I was holding a rubber band ball in my hand earlier and tossing it up in the air at about eye level. I noticed that I could see the shape of individual rubber bands on the axis of rotation on the outside of the ball but the edges of the ball were blurry. This got me thinking.. is a ball spinning slower near the axis than it is at the outer edge? Is the earth spinning faster at the equator than it is at the poles? If speed is d/t then the math makes sense to a layman like me that the ball would be rotating slower at the center and faster on the edges. Please help.
edit: holy shit. balls are fascinating.
In: 439
It spins at the same rotational speed throughout, but the tangential (or linear) speed changes depending on where you are looking at the ball.
Let’s say you’re on the Earth. The entire Earth rotates 360°/day, that’s 15°/hour or π/12 radians per hour. It doesn’t matter where you are on Earth for this.
If you’re 1m from the north pole, you will travel in a circle of circumference 2π m (6.28m) over the course of a day. That’s π/12 m/hr (.26m/hr or .00026 kph)
If you’re at the equator, you are 6.378×10^6 m from the axis of rotation, so over the course of a day, you travel in a circle of circumference of about 40,000 km. That’s a speed of 1670 kph.
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